


in the end (it's me and you)

by darlingargents



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Civilian Rebels, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Not Jedi, Enemies, F/F, Friends With Benefits, LGBTQ Female Character, Many alternate universes, Multi, Non-Consensual Kissing, Nonbinary Character, Other, Romance, Trans Female Character, alternate Universe - Sith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-12 13:58:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15341337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: Ten different paths. Ten different stories.





	in the end (it's me and you)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is an altered line from BTSK by MS MR.
> 
> Detailed and spoilery warnings in the endnotes. If you don't read them, just know that about half of the stories in this are as dark or darker than canon, and mind the MCD warning.

**i.**

In one universe, they’re Jedi, and they’re fighting the first war the Jedi have fought in thousands of years. Clone troopers fight by their sides. They meet on Geonosis, and become friends. A couple of years later, when Barriss has graduated to a Knight, she bombs a hangar, and Ahsoka takes the fall. Eventually, Barriss is discovered as the true culprit, and Ahsoka goes free — but her trust is broken in the Order, and she leaves. That’s the end of their story together, but the story itself goes on—

But you know that already, of course. That’s the story we know best.

There are others, too. A different turn taken, for some of them. Left chosen instead of right, a coin toss landing differently. Small shifts that change the path of the galaxy, and the way two lives intertwine — as these lives nearly always do.

Some are not caused by a shift during the lives of Barriss Offee and Ahsoka Tano, under whatever names they have. Some are before — changes in their location, their species, or their level of Force sensitivity.

There are millions of these stories. Some are long, some are short, some are sad, some are happy, and there are uncountable stories that are somewhere in between.

This is ten of them.

 

**ii.**

In one universe, Ahsoka doesn’t need to take the fall — because she was there along with Barriss, lighting the fuse.

Palpatine saw her, you see. He saw Anakin’s devotion to her, his protectiveness, his love — he saw her, in her impulsive anger, in her taking after her master. He saw her heart of gold, so similar to Anakin’s, and he twisted it.

It was a long, long process. But a few moments here and there, a bit of manufactured desperation to force her hand — well. It’s not impossible. And a teenager is easier to sway than an adult who has set in their ways. After all, she’s not his weapon — just a tool to get closer to it.

But it all goes so very wrong.

Ahsoka watches as the hangar goes up in flames. She can feel the death and bloodshed, feel it deep in her chest, somewhere close to her soul. Barriss goes pale with horror at her side. “There weren’t supposed to be people there, oh my — Ahsoka, we have to help them—”

“Shh,” Ahsoka says. “It’s okay. It’s for the greater good.”

Barriss stares in open horror. “Ahsoka, _no_ — this is wrong, this is _terrible_ —”

“Shh,” Ahsoka says again, and grabs Barriss’s wrist, pulling her in. Before she closes her eyes, she can see the reflection of them in Barriss’s wide, horrified gaze. They’re glowing yellow, and it sends a sickening jolt through her veins as she kisses Barriss’s slack, unmoving mouth.

Anakin confronts her about the bombing. She kills him, both of her lightsabers sinking into his gut before he can do more than reach for his weapon, and it’s too easy. She laughs as he gasps his last breaths, laughs as the Temple Guards find her and take her away. They think she’s gone mad, and don’t expect it when she lunges for one of their weapons.

She kills three — a stab through one’s chest, a slash that takes off a head and goes through another’s chest in one motion — before she’s tackled to the ground and loses consciousness, laughing the whole time.

Palpatine is furious. His plan has been destroyed. His chosen one is dead, and all he has is a lunatic child, already caught and lashing out in every direction to cause as much destruction as she can. He plans to salvage the situation, though. He can still use her.

Until, of course, Barriss visits Ahsoka in prison, and puts her lightsaber through Ahsoka’s throat. In her last moments, Barriss can see the glowing yellow go out of her eyes.

 

**iii.**

In one universe, they’re never Jedi at all. Barriss is a PhD student at the University of Coruscant, and Ahsoka is a mechanic who fixes Barriss’s speeder one day when she’s late for class and needs a ride desperately. One thing leads to another, and they fall in love and move in together.

When the Jedi fall and the Republic falls with them, Ahsoka can’t let herself not do anything. “If we don’t fight back, we’re as bad as them!” she shouts over the kitchen table as Barriss silently cries. Earlier that day, they came home to find their neighbour’s house barricaded, and bloodstains on the ground; her execution, for “Jedi sympathizing”, was broadcast an hour later.

They become a foundation of the resistance on Coruscant. Their movement is small and localized, but they wreak havoc on Stormtrooper operations in their area and recruit more and more people. Barriss codes messages of rebellion and hope into her papers. Ahsoka’s mechanic shop becomes a hub of activity, messages being left day and night, plans being made every day.

They’re too public, too bold. It can’t last.

One of Barriss’s papers is decoded in a random sweep by Imperial codebreakers, and she doesn’t crack when she’s taken in for questioning, but they watch Ahsoka’s shop, and manage to intercept a message going through. It damns them both.

They’re executed by firing squad. Dozens of people are identified as part of the rebellion, mostly from watching the security tapes outside Ahsoka’s shop and arresting everyone they can identify who goes in — including many innocent customers. They’re killed too. There has already been a genocide on Coruscant this year, and these deaths barely make an impact on the level of terror that permeates every being on the planet, but the rebellion is ended. As was intended.

Their bodies are strung up in public. There is never another resistance movement on Coruscant, and the planet lives in fear until the day Palpatine dies.

 

**iv.**

In one universe, they’re human. They’re on earth, and they meet in college, in the campus queer group. Barriss is terrified out of her wits, wrapping her arms around herself to keep from shaking as she walks in, but — she needs this. She needs to accept this part of herself.

She’d called her mother the night before, whispered _I don’t think I can do this_ into the phone. Luminara had been silent for a moment before asking, _are you afraid for your safety or afraid of accepting who you are?_

She’d known the answer. It doesn’t make it any easier to go in and sit down.

After the meeting, where she never says a word, someone approaches her, wearing a nametag that reads “Ahsoka, they/them”. Their hair is in dozens of braids, threaded through with blue and white. And they’re _beautiful_. Barriss is holding her breath without realizing it when Ahsoka holds out their hand.

“Hey,” they say. “I haven’t seen you here before. Barriss?” They read off the nametag and glance at Barriss’s face for confirmation of pronunciation. Barriss nods.

“Ahsoka,” she says, and takes Ahsoka’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

They exchange numbers, and end up texting nearly every day. They don’t share a major — Barriss is pre-med with a minor in music, and Ahsoka is in Gender and Sexuality Studies — but they share a couple of extra classes, and end up spending time together inside and outside of class. Ahsoka explains that they’re genderqueer, and just queer in general — “It’s less complicated, y’know? I like a lot of people, and gender is just like, what the fuck is that? I don’t know. It’s easier.” — and Barriss comes to realize that maybe she’s not quite a lesbian if she likes Ahsoka, too.

She doesn’t figure out a label that fits, but one day when they’re studying in Ahsoka’s pop-punk dorm room, Ahsoka asks if they can kiss her, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to lean in.

 

**v.**

In one universe, they grow up on Shili and Mirial, not knowing about the Force, but knowing about the Empire — knowing it’s hunting, hurting, destroying lives wherever it goes. They both survive and live their lives as much as they can, until they get tested by the cadet program. Something gets found in their blood. On two separate planets, on nearly the same day, Ahsoka Tano and Barriss Offee are taken from their families and lives. Taken to Mustafar.

They learn how to fight like Inquisitors. Anyone who knew them as Jedi would be horrified by the mockery they make of proper lightsaber fighting, but no one who knew them as Jedi exists in this universe. They do what they can, and survive the training, drawing strength from each other without realizing it.

At the end of training, Darth Vader meets with them. He’s heard tales of their progress, their incredible skill only enhanced by each other’s presence. He makes them spar for him, and wonders, briefly, what that feeling is when he looks at the Togruta.

No matter.

At the end, he tells them to spar once more. To the death. The winner will be an Inquisitor.

They don’t hesitate, and Ahsoka doesn’t feel much when she gets the upper hand and Barriss’s head topples to the floor.

She is called the Third Sister.

Her life ends when she goes to Mustafar and is killed by a monster in the dark whose eyes glow yellow in a tattooed, blood-red face.

 

**vi.**

In another universe, their lives are unremarkable and wondrous.

They both live on the same planet — not Coruscant, a small, Mid Rim planet with a decent economy and the capital to build cities and encourage trade. They live in a small town a couple hours by speeder away from a big city, and grow up living in each other’s orbits. They go to the same school, and while Ahsoka is busy staring out the window and aching to run and play and Barriss is studying hard, they get along fine. Ahsoka has an instinctive grasp on certain subjects, and on the occasions when they pair or team up for class work, they do very well together.

It’s not until they’re adults, though — Barriss returned from university in the city, and continuing her archaeological studies from her hometown — and they meet at the farmer’s marker one sunny day that they realize the spark that’s between them.

Ahsoka lives above a droid repair shop, and she grew up there. Her brother raised her and provided for her with it. On that day, she brings Barriss home along with new flowers to plant in the planter box outside the living room window, and they talk for ages before somehow ending up kissing on the couch. They only stop when Anakin comes up for a break and jumps out of his skin, startling them both and causing Ahsoka to fall and hit her head on the edge of the coffee table.

He apologizes and gives them their blessing. And he still feels the same when they move in together a year later.

In this universe, they grow old together. They never learn to fall asleep to the melody of blasterfire, they never have to make choices that will kill soldiers under their command. They never risk their own lives for a fight that doesn’t care about them. They never kill, they never wound, they never fight.

A part of them, perhaps, feels unsatisfied. It might be that something in their blood calls for war, that their brains were made to strategize and their bodies made to fight. But in this universe, they don’t have the Force. They aren’t Jedi. The war never happens, and they grow old together, and whatever part of them feels unfulfilled can only look to the rest of the life which surrounds them and say, _good enough_.

 

**vii.**

In another universe, they’re born a hundred years earlier. There isn’t a war. The Jedi are already deep into the stagnation that will eventually lead to their downfall, but it isn’t apparent to the majority of the Jedi that this is a problem. They live as ordinary lives as a Jedi can.

They grow up generally knowing of each other. They interact sometimes, but the Temple is massive and there are thousands of Jedi, and even only counting their age group, that’s still hundreds if not a couple thousand. They know of each other, but don’t know each other well. When they pass their Trials, they do it separately, with no knowledge of the other.

They get assigned a mission together as young knights. It’s a diplomatic mission, and they spend the whole two-day hyperspace journey going over Barriss’s research and Ahsoka’s talking points, and getting to know each other. They’re surprised at how well they get along, but grateful for it; the mission goes far better than expected, and they head home early with a job well done.

Ahsoka can’t sleep on the second night of the trip home. She finds Barriss awake when she goes to get a glass of water.

“I sleep better after sex,” she confesses, apropos of nothing, as they drink water in silence, and Barriss spits her drink across the floor, coughing up a storm a moment later. Ahsoka apologizes, and Barriss stares at her in bemused surprise before pulling her in for a kiss.

They sleep together, and it’s good — _very_ good. They agree that it was excellent, and seek each other out several more times over the next few years when bored or in need of stress relief.

They’re not in danger of falling in love, because they hardly know each other, here. And whatever in their souls that calls for the other is — quieter, here. It may, perhaps, sense that neither is willing to leave the Jedi for the other, regardless of any feelings of love. It’s uncomplicated, as it needs to be.

They’re friends for life. Friends who sleep together sometimes, who spar and chat and drink tea in the gardens and visit the nightlife of Coruscant. Best friends, really, in the end.

It’s the best outcome. This is a universe where they make it.

 

**viii.**

In one universe, Ahsoka is the first person Barriss comes out to. They’re human, and they’ve been best friends since their parents brought them together for play dates and they teamed up against Ahsoka’s older brother.

“I think I’m a girl,” she whispers, her cheeks burning. She’s afraid, and she’s lying. She _knows_ she’s a girl. But if she says it with certainty and Ahsoka reacts… badly, she won’t be able to handle that. So she hesitates.

Ahsoka is lying beside her in the grass. It’s spring break of eighth grade and they’ve biked to a meadow filled with daisies and they’ve been making daisy chains for hours. Ahsoka has one on her head and another strung around her neck. Barriss has a crown, too, and a bracelet.

“Oh,” Ahsoka says, sitting up. “She/her, then?”

Barriss breathes out a long breath and lets go of a clump of grass she’d pulled up without thinking. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you have a name chosen?” Ahsoka asks. Barriss feels weird, lying here while Ahsoka looms over her, but she doesn’t really mind. It’s Ahsoka. There’s no one she trusts more.

“Barriss,” she says quietly.

“Barriss,” Ahsoka says, and smiles.

 

**ix.**

In one universe, Barriss dies after the bombing. She’s executed only a few days later. And she wakes up, and is given a choice. She chooses redemption.

Redemption, in this case, means protecting Ahsoka.

For nearly twenty years, she exists as little more than a ghost — as pure Force energy, only able to act when Ahsoka’s life is in danger. Ahsoka finds out a few years in, but doesn’t discover her identity until right before she goes to Malachor.

Ahsoka’s heart is torn out of her chest. And Barriss is left behind on Atollon. Ahsoka doesn’t die on Malachor, but Barriss doesn’t see her again for nearly three more years.

And then her time is up. She asks if Ahsoka hates her, and Ahsoka says that she doesn’t. That she isn’t sure if she forgives her, but she doesn’t hate her. It’s good enough to put Barriss’s soul to rest. To give her the bravery she needs for what will come next.

Barriss kisses her, and walks into the light.

 

**x.**

In one universe, they leave the Order together. They fight on their own, and make their way in the galaxy, separate from everything that they grew up with — but it’s okay, because they’re together. They have a ship, and they go wherever they want. They fumble through a relationship, through love and sex and hardships. They hold hands walking through marketplaces, train together, and resolutely don’t talk about the life they left behind when they walked away from their masters.

One night, they both wake up screaming. The Force is burning around them. The Jedi are disappearing from the galaxy, sparks of life going out one by one like a fire being eaten by the dark. Something horrendous is rising in its place.

They’re on a planet with no fighting. They’ve been assisting during battles where they can, providing strategy and aid to rebel fighters and Republic troops, but they’d taken some time off after Ahsoka broke her arm.

They chose the wrong time to leave.

Or maybe the right time. It means they survive, and that’s something.

Barriss has been awake for barely three standard minutes when the ship starts to rise around her. Ahsoka had fought through the pain and ran to the cockpit, bringing up the ship as fast as she could. They both know it won’t do any good, that they’re too far away, that the slaughter can’t possibly go on long enough for them to make a difference — but they have to try.

When they arrive at the nearest embattled planet twenty minutes later, the screaming in Barriss’s brain has quieted. Jedi are still dying, but most of them are dead already. The Force is reeling in shock, and they’re too late to help.

Ahsoka looks down at the planet, watching the smoke rise and the ships of troopers leaving, and sits down and cries. Barriss holds her hand.

In this universe, they hear Obi-Wan’s message, and they find the lists of unaccounted-for Jedi, and they look for their kin. Ahsoka manages to track down Obi-Wan, and cries in his arms for an hour when he tells her the truth about Anakin.

(He’d tried to lie, but she saw through it in an instant.)

Eventually, they find a few survivors, Caleb Dume among them.

Eventually, they help unite the scattered Rebel cells.

Eventually, the plans for the Death Star are taken from Scarif as the team dies for their mission, and the tide is turned.

Eventually, they go back to Coruscant, and as fireworks light up the sky, celebrating the end of the Empire, Ahsoka kisses Barriss under the light, and asks if she’ll marry her.

Barriss laughs and cries, and says yes, yes, yes.

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery warnings per section:
> 
> Section I: canon-verse. Brief discussions of the bombing.
> 
> Section II: Sith!Ahsoka. Death and murder, without much detail; disturbing revelling in death; major character death (multiple); non-con kissing; Palpatine is there.
> 
> Section III: civilian rebels. Discussions of government executions, eventually including both Barriss and Ahsoka.
> 
> Section IV: human/college AU. Brief internalized homophobia.
> 
> Section V: inquisitors AU. Death, murder, major character death for both.
> 
> Section VI: I don’t know what to call it — normal, for Star Wars? No warnings.
> 
> Section VII: Jedi-but-before-the-war AU. Discussions of sex. (Several sections have mentions, but this one has a bit more.)
> 
> Section VIII: different human universe, childhood friends. No warnings.
> 
> Section IX: [guardian angel AU](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14142462). Major character death.
> 
> Section X: left-the-Jedi-to-be-together AU. Discussions of Order 66 and its impact.


End file.
